just kin' of Fields in Technology >>> BACK-n-FORTH <<<

Monday, November 14, 2011

Dr. Har Gobind Khorana :: lived Jan1922-Nov2011

Dr. Har Gobind Khorana

Indian Born, American Chemist

* Research on RNA, producing different strings of amino acids

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1968/khorana-bio.html

Youtube Video of Noble Prize Winner: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-BidjlCnHs

Monday, October 31, 2011

John McCarthy (jmc) lived:1927-2011


important contributions (as per I know)

* initiated the 'Time-Sharing' mechanism

* did initial development in field of A.I.

* creator of programming language 'Lisp' (just younger to Fortran)

* coined the term 'Artificial Intelligence'

* Invented Automatic Garbage Collection.

* published several Mathematical and Computational Logic Papers; even one of the initial papers on E-Commerce referred to as 'buying and selling by computers'

* even tried promoting his ideas through medium of literature, a science fiction made public by him..... 'The Robot and The Baby' (download as PDF).


Links to know more:

* First contribution mentioned wasn't known to me until I came across Herb Sutter's following article http://herbsutter.com/2011/10/25/john-mccarthy/

* "History of Lisp" by John McCarthy http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/lisp/lisp.html

* a Youtube Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvIqc0aBR0A

Thursday, October 27, 2011

Dennis Ritchie (dmr) lived:1941:2011

wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Ritchie

image courtesy: wikipedia
important contributions (as per I know)

* creator of 'C' Programming Lanaguge

* creator of 'Unix' (along-with Ken Thompson)

* was the R in 'K&R C', the awesome C book

* retired as Head of "Lucent Technologies System Software", Research Department in 2007


A Small Video of KenThompson & DennisRitchie over Unix:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoVQTPbD6UY


small Biography: http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/bigbio1st.html

ABC News Video "Unix Starting point for PCs" : 
http://abcnews.go.com.....video/unix-.....PC.....

got a fine theme for this blog after so many years

recently after dmr died, I just realized again that several people from ComputerScience/IT world don't know about several contributors instead of using their created technologies daily..... it's like living on a land without knowledge of who fought for its freedom

so, there was a new boost for this Blog that I registered several years back to talk about the grounds where we stand

so, first of all I'm not plagiarising Wikipedia or any such entry..... those links will be provided separately at a single place so everyone could look in detail at what major information is available

and just the major details and important notes to know the people/tech/* quickly will be present

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Social Engineering : an old real case [courtesy: Art Of Deception]


Social Engineering is the most damaging, feasible and research-oriented Hacking Technique for Reconnaissance about the target. In current scenario, most of the security practices are based on using infeasible mathematical complexity to design strong cryptographic algorithms. 

To counter such security practices, Hackers have been popularly using ‘Social Engineering’ tactics to collect all kind of information regarding the target to be used to break into their system. This sidesteps the need to carry out rigorous cryptanalysis on the cryptographic algorithm. This makes social engineering one of the most popular techniques used for hacking.

[courtesy.book: 'Art Of Deception']
ORIGINAL CASE STUDY

Its a real incident of Social Engineering, in 1978 'Stanley Mark Rifkin' was working under contract for 'Security Pacific'. He was there to develop a backup system for wire-room system's data. This role gave him authorities to access all transfer procedures. He knew bank officers were authorized to order wire transfer where they had a closely guarded 'daily code' to use while calling the wire-transfer room.

The employee in wire-transfer room used to keep a slip of that Code to be matched with the code confirmation by bank officers.
So, one day he went to "Authorized-Personnel-Only" wire-transfer room, where the staff sent and received transfers totaling several billion dollars every day. He showed that he is just there taking notes about some activities involved in his work, but his motive was to get a look of the code. 

He eyed the code, came back and made a fake call from pay-phone in the building lobby.

He told his name to be 'Mike Hansen', who was a Bank Officer in International Office. After confirming his identity with the stolen 'daily code', he asked the employee on phone to transfer 'Two Hundred Thousand Dollars' to Irving Trust Company by which he already had an account. Then employee on phone asked him for inter-office settlement number.

He just overlooked this requirement while preparing for this fraud, but he didn't give it up. He told her to wait for his another call because he don't remember it.

He then called another bank department, claiming an employee at wire-transfer room and obtained the settlement number.
He called back to Wire-Transfer room and gave the settlement number. The employee thanked him and completed the money transfer.